ManuCapture is a user-friendly book and manuscript-scanning software application designed to work with dual-camera book-scanning systems such as Factum’s Portable Book Scanner. ManuCapture enables dual-camera shooting using either continuous light sources or through flash-to-camera synchronisation. Combined with an Arduino based trigger board, the software also supports multiple shutter configurations.

The user interface is simple and optimised for ‘one-click’ actions (with either mouse or via touch screens) for performing useful tasks such as dual-page preview, zoom, recording queue and page crop editing.

The software integrates a set of important open-source tools supported by a wide community of users and developers, including GPhoto2 for camera control, Processing/Java for the user interface, raw image processing software such as Rawtherapee, ImageMagick and DCRAW, and standards-based archiving with ICA-ATOM. Combined with an Arduino based trigger board, the software also supports multiple shutter configurations. The ManuCapture software has been developed and tested in Linux and a Mac OS version is currently in progress.

The design and development of the ManuCapture software was led by Enrique Esteban. The software was developed by several contributors and supported by Factum Foundation for Digital Technology in Conservation.